Strategies 101

I recently watched Nimble’s CEO, Jon Ferrara, participate in a Google+ Hangout with the Influence Marketing guys: Danny Brown and Sam Fiorella. I enjoyed Jon’s passion for social CRM, and I appreciate Nimble’s approach, user interface, and willingness to integrate with other solutions. Mantis has our own Pulse Analytics monitoring and sentiment analysis product, so we share the same passion as Nimble for identifying and engaging the social customer.

“Change Management” is a necessary function with a terrible name. To most people, the word “change” itself is fraught with hidden meaning — personal interpretations that can be negative and that can throw up roadblocks to successful adoption. Read more ›

What are people learning about you online? You have some control over it.

Are you startled when you search for your company’s name on Google? If you’re active on the internet, you’re probably more popular than you know. Which can be a double-edged sword.

Reputation management – monitoring the web for references to your company or brand – should be on your to-do list every day.

Start With Google, Naturally

You can learn in a few seconds what everyone sees on that critical first results page when you enter your company name.

Google offers tools to assist with reputation management. They’re accessible through the Google Dashboard, which you can open through any of the company’s online products, like Gmail, Google Calendar or Google Docs (soon to be Google Drive). To sign in, click here and enter your Google username and password.

LEADING THOUGHTS There are many types of communities: there are user forums and more permanent communities – some “walled” and some open. Blogs are absolutely living, breathing communities, where comment discussions are oftentimes more valuable than the content itself. There are also ad-hoc communities that result from people coming together to discuss something — picture a “tweetchat” that comes together to discuss something. These are all communities, and although they are different in formation process, duration, barriers to entry (signup, pay wall, professional qualifications), and other aspects — they are all built with a purpose of bringing people together who share an interest and passion. When passionate individuals get together and engage with each other, it’s like music to people like me. A shared passion inspires engagement, action, reaching goals, discussion, discourse… and conflict.

LEADING THOUGHTS Welcome back! Last week, we wrote about the importance of goal setting for your engagement strategy, as it relates to social media in this particular example. What you do on the social web, just like any other business activity, can’t be haphazard. Social media is fun and exciting, and I fully understand the temptation of doing it for the sake of doing it. However, it’s a business activity, and you should approach it as such, with a plan for execution and measurement, metrics appropriate for your goals, and maybe even its own P&L.

Last week we talked about increasing awareness as a goal. If you don’t increase awareness, you won’t increase the number of unique users, and without that, you won’t grow your revenues (which is, or at least should be, your #1 goal). Sure, you could live off strong awareness for a while, getting everyone to try your product, maybe even buy it once. However, if your product doesn’t deliver what you promised it would, no one will want to repurchase or purchase after the trial runs out. There’s a word for that — hype. You don’t want to be one of those. You will risk turning off your loyal early brand champions, possibly resulting in bad word of mouth. For revenue to sustain and even happen at all, you need to tend to goal #2: customer experience.